


Gods

by Red122



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Character Death, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/M, Flashbacks, Horror, Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:00:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24544279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Red122/pseuds/Red122
Summary: The P30 had worked well, and now she was his.
Relationships: Jill Valentine/Albert Wesker, Leon S. Kennedy/ Jill Valentine (Brief)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 57





	1. Awake

Jill was 24 years old when she was recruited into S.T.A.R.S. Wesker had picked her file out of an impressive bunch, seeing something he particularly craved in her. She fulfilled expectations in the office and on the streets of Raccoon city well enough, but he hadn’t known she had that _fire_ until the incident in the Arklay mountains. 

Indeed, Jill Valentine had always been superbly impressive. But now, Wesker thought as he admired the sight of her in the cryostasis chamber, she was perfect.

“Sir,” A scientist to his left meekly called out, “She is ready to emerge from the chamber.”

Wesker took another moment in silence, still looking at her. She was so pale now, her dark locks drained to a pale blonde. Like his. The thought brought forth a sick pleasure. She was just like him now. The P30 would ensure that. _And_ , Wesker thought _, In time she will understand._ Then, they wouldn’t need the P30 anymore.

“Release her, and then flee” Wesker said to the scientist and readied himself for the fight.

The scientist nodded and quickly pressed a succession of keys, before running out of the experimentation chamber. The machines trembled and smoke grew from the machine, before Jill’s blue eyes frantically opened and she fell from her would-be coffin.

She groaned for only a moment, a single second afforded to her by his grace and her weakness, before recalling that something had gone horrible wrong.

“Jill,” Wesker said as her eyes caught his boots from her position on the floor, “Nice of you to join us.”

_“Jill,” Wesker said as she arrived 42 minutes late on only her third day as a S.T.A.R.S officer, “Nice of you to join us.”_

She was on her feet almost immediately, a feat only made possibly by his mutations in her blood and the P30 coursing through her veins. She threw a fist to his jaw and knee to his stomach, so fast it may have been a nearly the same time. He threw her arm down and knocked her leg away, pushing through her defenses to pin her to the wall face first.

“You’ll have to try harder than that, Cadet.”

_“You’ll have to try harder than that, Cadet.” It was a brag. One that infuriated her. She had been with S.T.A.R.S for nearly two years and he still called her cadet, always confident that she would never best him in the ring. She pushed her anger to the side and knocked him down, quickly grappling him and pinning his arms above his head._

_“You’ll have to try harder than that, Cadet.” She mimicked him, and stood up._

Jill broke his hold on her and shoved him back, quickly advancing with a series of blows that would have crushed an ordinary man.

Wesker was elated. The uroboros mutation in her already existing T-virus strains had taken to her. She was the only one to survive it. And now, she was a God. Like him, catching his blows and soon, whether she realized it or not, ruling beside him. There was only one more factor to be determined.

“Jill,” he called out as she threw another punch, “On your knees.”

Jills eyes widened as she found herself thrown to the ground by her own force, crumbling knees first into the tile. She struggled and growled as she tried to get up and _fight_ him.

Wesker smirked. His plan was perfect. The P30 had worked well, and now she was his.

“Wesker!”, she growled, “What…did…you do to….me?!”

Wesker kneeled down to her height, taking hold her head in his hands as though she were his child.

“I’ve made you perfect.” He smiled at her, golden eyes shining like twin suns on an undeserving specimen.

Jill tried to attack and, upon realizing she could not lay a hand against him, screamed.


	2. Mansions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jill recalls the mansion- and what happened after.

Jill Valentine survived hell itself, on a few different occasions.

Memories of Arklay burned through her nightmares and found their way into her everyday life. It was all a shuffle of making it through the second until the seconds all ran together and became the day. She woke up crying every day for two years after her night in the haunted mansion. She dressed slowly, at first, keeping herself on guard lest someone - a _creature_ , with gnarled teeth and sloughing skin _lunge_ for her throat- break into her apartment and attack her. Later, after months and months of self- destruction, she dressed the same way she used to before the incident in the mountains. Let someone come. Let them kill her. Why live?

Jill would then take the subway to work- the same subway she would, hardly a few months after Arklay, watched ripped apart by a _thing_ beyond God’s sight. A _thing_ that killed countless others in its desire for _her_. On the subway, she’d keep one hand on her bag and the other on her gun. She had eyes on everyone. She was always waiting, always ready for the next incident.

She’d breathe a small sigh of relief when the subway pulled into her station: Redstone Street. And then she’d walk fast, so fast that her friends would ask her where she was running to all of the time. She’d get into to work. She’d make it through the day. She’d say some things wrong when making chit chat- an odd side effect of trauma. You simply become unable to know what a _normal_ response to everyday interactions is. And then she’d repeat the morning. Walk fast to the subway. Grip her bag and purse. Eyes on everyone. Change her clothes. Get drunk, and fall asleep.

After months and years of this, she stood alone in the shower and admitted a horrible truth to herself: She wanted to go back to the mansion.

Jill Valentine had been ruined. She only knew the hell in the Arklay Mountains. Only felt normal when her hypervigilance was warranted. When her dark humor was _normal_ , in the right setting, where it wouldn’t be mistaken for bitchiness. Jill felt like a wild animal amidst her friends and coworkers, none of whom could understand the horrors of the haunted mansion in the deep, dark woods.

But all of the glances behind her back, the nightmares, they were _right_ , but only there. In the mansion. She could still hear the loud drag of Lisa Trevor’s cement handcuffs; the low and agonized moaning erupting from her gnarled throat. The frantic scream she emitted when she caught sight of you from afar. She was a normal person there, in the mansion with the ghouls and terrors. Here, on subway platform 4, on the way to Redstone street, she did not belong. She simply could not understand life here anymore.

Jill remembered when she was in her tenth grade high school history class, learning about the war in Vietnam. She remembered her teacher, a tall and scrawny brown haired man, telling the students about how the shell shocked soldiers moved to the Everglades after the war. Jill visited the Everglades once. It’s a cruel place. A horrible environment in which any wrong step could mean losing your leg to an alligator. Every turn could bring with it a bite from a venomous snake. It’s the only place on the planet where crocodiles and alligators live together.

Jill shuddered when she realized that she understood them. She thought of them in the Everglades and saw lightening flash behind her eyes and saw in that moment a picture of the mansion atop a gloomy hill. She turned the water off, and walked out of the shower. She dressed fast and took a swig of the whisky she kept beside her bed. She put on the TV. She took another swig. And another. And then she closed her eyes and in her sleep she went back home, to the shadows of the mansion, avoiding the shuffling creatures and the low scraping of Lisa Trevor’s claws on the tile.

And so, when Jill opened her eyes after that fateful fall and found herself in the arms of the devil, her stomach sank when she realized that she felt more like herself than she had in years. She thought of Chris and wondered if he’d understand. And when she realized that the devil had taken hold of her leash and controlled her every move, when she realized that she would _become_ the mansion now, reigning terror and hell on all those she neared, something broke inside of her and- _she screamed_.


	3. Red Suns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wesker reminds Jill of exactly who she is.

The first stages are experimental. Raise your right arm. Raise your left arm. Kill him.

She tries to resist, at first. And all of her efforts are in vain. It amuses him. He smirks at every futile attempt, until one attempt is not so futile.

It’s a young woman, maybe twenty, clutching her baby boy. She’s screaming, cowering in the corner from a pale woman holding a semi-automatic - _Jill_ -. Jill’s body, Wesker’s toy, takes a step towards the woman. And another. And then something in Jill snaps and she fights her absolute hardest. She clutches her chest in a vain attempt at ripping out the device in her heart and then she falls to her knees. The woman takes this as her chance to grasp her child and run. Wesker’s smirk falters, but only for a moment.

He tuts at Jill as he walks towards her. “Jill,” he said, “I knew you were still in there.”

“Goddamn you, Wesker!” She growls out through the pain, still futile tearing at the device on her chest.

“Jillian,” he tilted his head as though disappointed in her, “Is that anyway to talk to your captain?”

Jill collapsed entirely on the ground, arms spread out weakly around her, glare fixed firmly on Wesker. “You’re not my captain,” she coughed, “You never were.”

“Jill,” he says as he presses some buttons on his phone. Jill hears two gunshots in the distance. He’s had his soldiers kill the escaped woman and her child. “That hurts me. After all the times we had, all of the _shared experiences_. After R.P.D., S.T.A.R.S, _Arklay_.”

The mention of Arklay sends another surge of rage ripping through her veins and she finds the strength to stand and face him. She pulls her arm back but cannot muster the strength to hit him. She wants to though. He can see it in her eyes, no matter the dose of p30. He loves it.

Wesker takes a predatory step towards her. And another, until he is standing above her. She glares at him from her position on the floor, sweat glistening as she tries her all to fight against the p30. 

“Jill, stand.”

And she does.

“Salute your captain.”

And she does. Through gritted teeth, he notes. Still fighting.

“Recite the details of our first mission together.”

“July 1st, 2005. We staked out a lodge in the middle of the Everfire mountains for three days, waiting for the perp to return. We knew that he brought all of his victims to his lodge to be tortured before he killed them and mutilated their bodies. He had just taken a new girl and we waited to catch him.”

“And who was your partner on that mission?”

“You” she bit out

“Why?”

“You assigned Chris to desk duty.”

“And our last mission? Formally, that is?” He smirked

“Arklay mountains.” She said in a much quieter voice, “Investigating what happened to Brave team. Start of the nightmare.”

“And where were your teammates?”

“Chris had disappeared in the woods. Barry was off doing your bidding, as I would later learn. There was only you.”

Wesker gripped her face in his palm. “And there will only ever be me. I was there for your first breath as a S.T.A.R.S officer and your last breath as a B.S.A.A. lieutenant.” He chuckled for a moment, not loosening his grip on her. “And your first breath again, as _mine_. That’s all you ever were, Jill, and it’s time you remember that.”

He threw her to the floor. She easily caught herself on all fours.

“Those reflexes? Even before the P30, they were mine. I taught you everything you know. Now attempt to subdue me.”

 _Gladly_ , Jill thought. She jumped to her feet and threw fist after fist at him. Each blocked easier than the last one. She threw herself towards the wall to bounce off of it, throwing herself at Wesker in an attempt to wrap her legs around his throat and break his neck. He gripped her thigh and reversed the position, landing her in a broken puddle at his feet.

_At first, Jill thought she was dead. Life after death was just a gray blur, a faint humming the distance. And then, black leather and boots pick her broken body from the ground- and a hiss- I’m not done with you yet, Valentine!_

_By the end of the day, she would wish she died._

“And even now,” Wesker said easily, as though he had not just won a fight against a super soldier, “ They’re all still mine. Your reflexes, your battle knowledge, your know-how in the field.” He gripped her wrist and pulled her to her feet, shoving her against the wall. He pulled her zipper down to her navel, unveiling the device on her chest. “Even what runs through your veins, is mine. When will you understand, Jill?”

_“Poor Chris. When will you ever understand?” She glanced to her right. Redfield hated when Wesker said that._

Wesker’s eyes stayed on her chest for some time after. He took his phone from his pocket and pushed a few buttons and Jill saw the eerie red glow of the device and a soft warmth flood through her body. Wesker let go of her chest and she fell in a crumpled mess against him, doing her best not to break out in full sobs in front of him. He caressed her hair as though she were a petulant child, having just had a tantrum.

He let her fall to the floor, zipper still down and device still glowing a bright red between her pale breasts. She felt naked to her core, absolutely exposed by him. Worse, _made_ by him. Wesker told her what happened at the Spencer estate, what led to all of this carnage. How it felt to discover he had been _manufactured_ , made _by_ someone for a cause.

She looked up at him. Pale blonde hair over blood red eyes, black leather over lithe muscle. She looked down at her chest again, the blood beetle pushing venom through her veins. Brunette hair bleached to his blonde, skin the color of a ghost, black and blue leather about her body. A mockery of what she was before him: baby blue cotton and a barrette. Now this, navy blue leather straps over an onyx colored leather body suit. All covering a body he had trained and then redesigned in his image.

She imagined him in the moonlight, standing over the corpse of Oswell E. Spencer, discovering that his fate was not his own, but that of his maker’s. Her stomach curled when she understood, perfectly, how Wesker felt in those cold moments.

She took one last look at him, not as her enemy, but as the malevolent maker she so loathed. And upon seeing his red eyes staring back down at her like two crimson suns, bathing her in the light of evil, she realized a horrible and crippling fact.

This is exactly where she’s meant to be. Here, with him. Doing this. From the start, her whole life led to this. To him.


	4. Baptism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The consummation. 
> 
> (Noncon warning)

The first time Wesker takes her, she’s only vaguely surprised.

It was after the incident with the woman and her child. She was showering, the only time she can take alone, when he steps into the bathroom with her and wraps a long, tan arm around her torso. He pulls her closer into her and breathes in her wet hair. She hopes that this is just another trick, another way he’ll show her how defenseless she is, and then leave her alone.

She is not so lucky.

In another second she is shoved face first against the wall. The shower water is pouring down their bodies as he pushes her legs apart and places himself between them. He grips her hair hard.

“You will never escape.” He hissed into her as he grips her breast so hard she is certain it will pop. “You will never save anyone!” He nearly shouts it as he throws her onto the shower floor. She lands hard on her back and looks up at him, shocked. She thinks, for only a second, what the Jill from 2005 would think now. She never imagined, on her first or her last day as a S.T.A.R.S officer, that her captain would see her naked, would do this to her.

Wesker falls to his knees and climbs on top of her. She feels the weigh of his girth against her thigh, at a slight slant. He pulls her hair again and her back arches to accommodate the grip on her scalp.

“You can resist and resist,” He hisses into her hair as his free hand roams her torso and hips, “You will never succeed.”

She remains silent, until he realizes that she cannot respond without his say-so. “Speak, Jill.”

“Fuck you!” She bites out, “Fuck you and fuck Umbrella and fuck the P30. The B.S.A.A. will find you. _Chris_ will find you. And then you’re fucked.”

Wesker chuckled at the mention of Chris’s name. “ _Chris_ ,” he hissed, “Golden boy _Chris_. Held captive in Arklay.” Her body tensed at the mention of that godless place. “And then absent from Racoon in its darkest hour. Not half of the soldier that you are. And look where _you_ are, Jill.”

And the P30 in her veins pulsed, and she did as she was told. Here she was. Jill Valentine. Top of her class. S.T.A.R.S officer. Founding member of the B.S.A.A. An international star of the effort against bioterrorism. Naked, vulnerable, under the control of a madman. Pinned beneath her former captain. Not even an echo of who she used to be, only a caricature of a hero. Only the weak, pathetic _monster_ he made her.

“What do you see, Jill?”

She purses her lips, tries not to answer. He tuts at her.

“Still resisting. Jill, what do you see?”

She can’t resist anymore. “Me.” She says, “Me. Underneath you. In every way. Here. Now. In S.T.A.R.S” She tries to stop herself from saying anything else but, as always, the P30 wins. “Even after Arklay.”

Wesker’s head tilts, “Explain”

And then she tells him everything, like a confession from a sinner to a priest. She tells him about the nightmares. About her new found liking towards bourbon. About how even seeing someone with blonde hair was enough to send her into a spiral that could last weeks. She tells him about how she was called for jury duty and the lawyer had blue eyes, the same color blue that she always assumed Wesker had under his glasses. She tells him about how the lawyer bent down to her height, and looked her in the eyes, and how she had to muster all of her strength to avoid screaming in the courthouse. She tells him about how she hasn’t had sex in years because every touch reminded her of how Wesker gripped her neck after he forced her to drop her gun in the Arklay Mountains. How absolutely ruined she is for all things in the wake of him.

After, Wesker takes a moment of silence. He watches her. And then, he pushes in. She feels him fill her, entirely, and she bites her lip to stop from screaming.

He may have taken everything else, but she won’t give him that.

His arms wrap tightly around her pale torso as he continues his siege on her body. She thinks to herself, vaguely and without words, that his siege started long before her shower started. She tries to fight him off, but can’t. Half of her mind is focused on the situation at hand. The other half can’t help but fixate on what 2005 Jill would think. She never imagined, as she shook her new captain’s hand on her first day as a S.T.A.R.S. officer, that she’d find herself under his power and _fucked_ only a few years later.

Wesker pulled her up and into his lap, thrusting from beneath her. She felt him hit her womb and hoped that he’d pull out, knowing that the P30 wouldn’t let her protest his absolute invasion of her body.

“Put your arms around me, Valentine”

A strange formality, to use her last name in a moment this intimate. A sentiment shared between two people who have known each other, and put their lives on the line for each other, for years. But she does not protest and, instead, she does as the P30 bids her and puts her arms around him.

He wraps his arms around her waist and pulls her closer, his mouth wrapping around her breast and sucking until it becomes blue. He moves his mouth after, in the moments before his climax, and bites at her throat. He released his grip on her throat for only a second to whisper: “Finish, now.”

And she does.

Just as Wesker finds his completion, Jill can barely stifle her scream as she finds hers. Her entire body feels on fire, as though those red sun eyes of his have finally set her ablaze. She’s thrown somewhere else, where she is still Jill Valentine and not Jill Wesker. But that moment lasts only a few seconds before she looks back down and sees the eyes of the devil staring, _satisfied_ , up at her.


	5. Adam and Eve

A pirouette. A dance. A flash of leg high in the air and the sickening _crack_ of her ankle smashing through the skull of her newest prey. _Perfection_.

He smiles to himself. She is perfection. His progeny. His masterpiece. An absolute warrior. More than that, the mother of his uroboros. It was her cells and his mutagens that created his virus. They created the fire that will raze the world of the genetically inferior. In a sense, they are Adam and Eve. But Wesker’s good mood is fouled at the thought of her desires. She, created of his rib and alive by his genetic engineering, craves the snake. _Chris_. Every day, she awaits his return for her. 

It’s a bittersweet thought. She has all but given up on saving herself. She knows that the P30 has an absolute hold over her body. But she still hopes. Still waits for the snake to wrap its long body around hers and use its venom to destroy the P30 in her system. The thought infuriates Wesker. The P30 is not venom. The P30 is the cure. It has perfected her. And yet, despite all he has given her, she still craves the snake.

He remembers the Mansion incident, as Jill and her snake referred to it afterwards. He remembers watching her battle hordes of creatures in her desperate attempt to free Chris from his confinement. He spent the entire night, that night which is so fervidly engraved into her consciousness, trapped in the safety of a steel cage whilst she battled for his freedom. Even then, she was Amazonian in her affinity for war. Even then, Chris held her back.

“Jill,” Wesker speaks and she stops mid high-kick, “Stop. Return to me.”

A flash of red where her heart should be, and she obeys. He wraps a gloved hand around her jaw.

“Why do you still resist such a simple action? You _will_ return to me.” _P30 or not,_ he thinks to himself.

Jill does not answer. His grip around her tights. He puts a gloved hand on her hip, _squeezes_. “Jill,” he whispers and takes a good look at her. Muscles tighter. Waist ever so thinner. Blue eyes blazing. Uroboros pulsing through her veins.

He presses his lips to hers. Her eyes widen. For once, he is not all consuming. The kiss is gentle, soft even. His grip on her jaw and hip are light. It feels so _wrong_. This is not Wesker. This must be a trick.

He pulls away from her, breathless. She is too frozen to inhale, unable to comprehend the monster’s gentility. She wonders what Chris would think. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Super short, I know, but a longer chapter is on its way!


	6. The Beginning

Jill returns to Arklay. Returns to the mansion, reconstructed as a spooky museum. Built exactly where the original mansion was, same rooms, same hallways, same wallpaper. She hears that serial killer fans and horror movie nerds pay nearly 300$ a ticket, anything to take a look at a real life hell. The organization that runs the new mansion has spared no expense. All is as it was that fateful night. They’ve even paid actors to shamble across hallways, groaning hopelessly for human flesh.

She walks into the lobby as though she is being welcomed home. One night in the haunted mansion, and she is more familiar with it than any place she has ever been. Her stomach churns. She breaths in deeply, hates how much she feels that she belongs. Wesker stands behind her, closes the door behind them. The consummation has begun, she knows. Just as it did that night when she became _of_ the mansion. More than Chris, more than Barry. She hears Wesker’s steps behind her. An even tapping on the porcelain as he saunters towards her. Flashes of less even footing shoot through her, memories of claws and sloughing flesh longing, _reaching_ for her.

The lights of the mansion twinkle for her. She can almost see through the walls, if she imagines hard enough. Can see all of the narrow hallways, so hard to avoid someone coming straight for you in such a narrow hallway. Can see the corners she had to turn, never knowing what was on the other side. The furniture zombies laid under, until they caught sight of pale ankles and crawled from to snap and bite and reach and pull and _claw_. She looks at her feet, underneath them. Recalls the chamber Lisa Trevor was trapped in. Wonders distantly how much of the true Mansion remained. If its bones remembered her.

She thinks that it does. She can feel it. The mansion has its own spirit, and it’s elated to see its unwitting lover return.

She takes an uneasy step forward. Thinks then, should she retrace her original steps? Walk carefully into the dining room, into the attached hallway, _find Kenneth_ , give birth to the nightmare again. Should she ascend the staircase, enter the depths of the beast. Or even unlock the hidden staircase, descend into the true darkness of the haunted mansion.

Here’s what no one tells you about movement in haunted houses. Every step can be the step you’ll wish you never took. Every turn of your head can be the moment you see a monster in the corner of your eye. Every bookcase, every corner, every door, can be the one that you a large, bloodied claw crawl out of. But, in the end, it’s a game. And if you stay where you are, if you don’t _move_ , you lose. Simple as that. Get going. With caution, but not too much. Fast enough, but not too fast. Careful enough, but not too careful. You can afford no lapses. The difference between noticing if your pursuer is left handed or right handed, seems to have a bad knee, has a tendency of looking left first, and acting in accordance with that, is the difference between life and death.

Jill remembers all of their faces, every zombie. Every monster. Lisa Trevor. Uroboros. She realizes she’s not entirely correct. The difference between life and death, yes, but more than that. She recalls the haunted look in Lisa Trevor’s eyes, remembers the primal scream that erupted from her grotesque mouth, the elongated and gnarled limbs. It’s the difference between life and death and _hell_ itself.

Wesker tutted from behind her. Speaking of the devil. He moves behind her and wraps his arms around her waist, leaning to whisper into her ear.

“Feels like the beginning, doesn’t it, Jill?”

Ah, yes, the beginning. Of course.

“Yes.” She says.

“And when you left here that night,” he whispers, quietly, as though they were an old couple recalling the beginning of their great love story, “You thought you and I would never be together again, unless it was on opposite sides of the battlefield.”

“Yes,” she says again, recalling distantly who she was back then.  
He moans quietly into her ear, “And look at us now.”

Jill looks out of the corner of her eye, sees their reflection in the mirror on the wall. In the back of her head, she distantly remembers the zombie entrails that were splattered all over that same mirror all of those years ago. But the front of her head, the primary arena of her brain, is focused on right now. The intimate embrace. The devil’s lips on her ear. His arms around her waist. Her black hair, drained of color to match his own. Her eyes glaring at her from the mirror. The only part of her that remains. The blue eyes she always had, enraged and accusing. _You were weak, you let this happen to you_. She feels Wesker’s arms tighten around her waist.

The mirror’s words remain the same. _You let this happen to you._


	7. Wishes, and Leon

The truth is that Jill hates Arklay. She hates Wesker. Through everything, she does hate them.

The truth is also that she isn’t herself without them. Jill wishes that this truth could be quiet, an ugly thing she pushes to the back of her mind and never looks directly at. But it’s loud and it demands to be known, more known than anything else in her damned life. The truth is that Jill isn’t herself without a world of absolute terror and an iron grip of cold efficiency. She saw it in the months after Arklay, in the months after Wesker.

In the months after Arklay, Jill lived a fairly regular life. She did not tell her friends and family about the events of the haunted mansion. She did not seek the help of a therapist. She was an agent, after all, and agents are tested on not only their physical fitness but on their psychological soundness as well. Jill could not sabotage her livelihood by doing something as inane as visiting a psychiatrist.

And so Jill woke in the morning. And so she dressed, and so she boarded the train. And so she made friendly chit-chat with the barista at Starbucks, asked about how her father was doing after his surgery. The barista doesn’t speak much English, but she is happy that someone has asked and she smiles at Jill. Jill smiles back.

Jill is mostly silent at work, where is on desk duty. Irons will not let her speak of the mansion incident. Chris has fled to Europe with a burner phone that is only to be rung upon an emergency. Jill is alone, entirely alone.

Jill studied art history in college, before she enrolled in the air force. Jill feels it first, for a long time, and then she knows. She is a piece of abstract watercolor art. She is torn away from her canvas and glued into another portrait, one done in realist ink. She does not belong. It only takes one look to tell.

Jill thinks a lot about that. She thinks about how it’s so easy to tell there is something off about her, that she simply does not belong with the others of this ink world. She thinks about her watercolor world too. She imagines that it is cruel, filled with zombies and a man with blonde hair and eyes the color of silken blood. She smiles then, quietly, to herself. The image is horrible. She remembers vividly, the feeling of rotted teeth tearing through her muscles. Long, decayed fingernails clawing along her skin. The constant wondering, did Chris die? Did Barry? And, before the big reveal, did Wesker?

It’s horrible. And a part of her feels disgusting to make such a note, but she can’t help it. She’d rather be there. She’s not herself here. She’s not in a world that understands her here, not in a world that welcomes her.

Christmas comes and goes. Friends in green and red sweaters. Jill wears a dark blue, a touch on what she wore to Arklay, only much darker. Jill does not fit. She is an apex predator in a room of unwitting victims. Cattle, even.

And so Jill prays. She prays to a God she does not believe in. Please, don’t let Wesker know this truth. Don’t let him know.

But he does, and so he invites. And so she kills, slowly, with purpose, feeling every second of it. Perhaps even more intimately than her victims do.

He hurts her. He makes her hurt everyone. People who pick up a sad looking hitcher-hiker on the road. Old friends who think they register the one, the only, Jill Valentine.

At the beginning, Jill wished someone would save her, only after she realized that Wesker had taken her will and she could not save herself. After a while, Jill wished that she would never run into someone she knew ever again. Wesker knew all that she knew, courtesy of the P30. And so, he made her hurt and kill everyone who dared to love Jill Valentine. The only people who could live were the ones who knew Jill Wesker. Any hint of Valentine, of the love that was born before she was _Wesker_ , must be destroyed.

Jill, sometimes, is left alone in her chamber. Between Missions. When Wesker was busy. It’s during these times that she wishes she would just die. But she never attempts suicide. Not because Wesker would know, and stop her. But because a part of her knows that he would just be waiting her on the other side anyway. After all, there was no escaping the devil. Especially when the devil was such a part of you that you couldn’t tell the two apart.

And then Jill ran into Leon S. Kennedy.


	8. And So,

Jill can admit it. Sometimes she drinks too much. _You would too_ , she reasons _, if you had seen and done all that I have_. The thought is always accompanied by a flash of the mansion’s hallways, its gardens, specks of red over a rotting white wall.

Sometimes, when Jill wakes up, she sees something that reminds her of someone else. A knife, maybe, when she’s cooking breakfast. _She shuffles on bloodied knees, takes hold of the clattered knife and thrusts it in Lisa’s eyes. The scream that emerges will haunt her forever, she knows, if she survives this or not_. Or she’ll walk past her bookcase, see her old baseball trophy. _Jill Valentine: English teacher, Married to Jake Nobody, Math teacher. 2.5 kids and a dog._ Wrong, _no longer a possibility, maybe never was_. TV shows, sometimes, too. Romance movies. _Carlos’s dark eyes, frantic voice ripping through zombie moans and Nicholai’s angry grunts-----_ _Jill! Shoot! No, I’ll shoot you too! You HAVE TO!----_ Jill closes her eyes _\- A shot rings through the air- A decision she will_ have to live with forever _, no matter what happens in the next few minutes._

And so, Jill remains. She remains there, knife in hand, tv remote in hand, and baseball trophy far in the distance. Too much becomes too much, and so she makes it all become _less_. Whisky does the trick.

And so, Jill’s life goes on. She gets a job in a police department somewhere in the northeast, works on establishing the B.S.A.A. with Chris. It’ll take some time, cutting through all of the joint Governmental and Umbrella’s red tape. She wakes each morning and gets to work, does her job efficiently and coldly _(beady red eyes glaring- shining a godless light on her victims- black leathered hands do their job efficiently, coldly, a death bringer)_ and then she goes home.

One day, Jill walks out of the police station and she turns to make a right. From there she will enter the Etherwood subway station, ride the subway for seven stops, exit it at the Spencer station, walk for thirty seconds to her building, and arrive at her new apartment. Today, Jill, for no apparent reason, makes a left. She walks far away from her routine. Away from the subway where she will clutch her purse in one hand and her gun in the other. She is still clutching them in the street, as always, but with a decidedly less firm grip. More open space out here, you see. Jill walks and she sees bodies walking too. _People_ , she realizes, she never really sees their faces. She walks and she walks until her navy blue boots have red stains on their soles. _Won’t be last time she tracks blood where she goes, red eyes glimmer, leather arms embrace, a satisfied sigh, Isn’t that right, Jill. _

And so, Jill wandered. She wandered until she almost walks into the face of a bar. A shady, grimey, hole in the wall place with a cheap looking sign that reads in cold letters O’FLANNIGAN’S. _Good enough_ , she thinks. She pulls open a creaky door and, ah, there he is. Tall and blonde, sad blue eyes in a crestfallen face. Whisky swirling in his glass. Shoulders relaxed, loose, as though he were ready to react appropriately to whatever bloodthirsty creature came crawling through that creaky door. _Or_ , Jill thought as recognized that familiar slouch, _as though he were ready to simply stop supporting the weight of his body and die right there_. She thinks for a moment of just turning around and walking away, pretending she had never seen Leon there.

But it was too late. Slowly those lax shoulders rose, blonde locks parted and cold bue eyes stared at her.

“Jill,” He spoke in that low way that only he could, calm and lax like the lazy strumming of a guitar on a breezy summer morning, “You gonna come in and sit with me or what?”

And so, Jill does just that. She strips off a navy trench coat and sits down with one of the six survivors of the Raccoon City incident. They sit in silence for nearly an hour, enough conversation between their shared experiences alone to keep the space between them occupied. The airs of one another, of the nightborn creatures they’ve come to be, is enough. They avoid looking directly at each other, most of the time. Every glance into one another’s eyes is full of glimpses of zombie hands reaching out for them, throaty groaning of creatures fixated on them, the echoes of haunted hallways and the tortured moans of all its residents. They look at each other and, without a word, they see all of it.

It’s more than that, they see what they each have become. Jill was there when they hired Leon, she had shaken his hand and seen his baby blues tingling with excitement. Those weren’t the same blue eyes staring at her now. Now, they were spitting images of hers. Regret. Death. Hatred. _Resignation_. Always the resignation, always the awareness. He sighs heavily, with his entire body, so naturally that she is unsure if he even knows he’s done it. She recognizes that sigh too.

They don’t say anything. They pay the bill. They walk some distance to the left, get on the DarkStreet Station, take it all the way downtown to the Spencer Station, Leon clutches his gun the entire time, too, walked for thirty seconds to Jill’s new apartment. Neither of them are safe, from anything. But together is the most whole they’ve felt in years. The intimacy of someone who _knows_ , who understands. Because no one else ever could, no matter how you described it to them. Words are not enough, words can’t even scratch the surface. The haunted mansion takes a lot from you. But it renders you absolutely silent as well, no matter how much and how well you might try to speak of it. The corridors of that godless place have its own air, one that you become accustomed to breathing with each avoided fate. And no one else, no one on the outside of that, can know.

He does, though. He has breathed that air. He has known those corridors as they have known her, has felt the cold grasp of Death itself on his throat. He knows. She can see it in his eyes. Can see it in the air around him.

And he makes it so easy. They get into her apartment and he pulls her trench coat off, kisses her roughly. Grabs at her hair and slams her against the wall, _hurts_ her. She hurts him through, squeezing at his throat and clawing at his face. He twists her arm behind her and she flips them both, ends with his shirt torn off of his body and knee to his gut. But Leon moves fast and pulls a knife to her throat, smirks at his newest conquest, and then freezes, feeling the knife she has firmly planted against his ribs, at the perfect angle to thrust into his heart.

For a second, they each feel like themselves again. And then it feels, for just one second, like home. His touch on her feels so natural, as though they were made for one another. And the hours rush by like that, lazy fucking on her kitchen floor. A gentle admiration of a soul she had come to see as one of her own. A member of her own species, someone who innately understood all of things she hadn’t even known she’d been so desperate to communicate.

Jill is always alone. She is alone with her coworkers. She is alone with the bright, cherry faces of the newly forming B.S.A.A. She is alone when she visits her family. She is alone when she goes out for drinks with her friends. Jill is alone all of the time, no matter where she goes and who she is with.

She is not alone with him.

They fall into an easy routine. Sex in bathroom stalls, at her place, at his, on the side of the road, in the woods, in dank motel rooms. She is intoxicated at his embrace, consumed by his touch. Some days he makes fast work of her clothes and takes her completely, filling in her up so much she can almost imagine what it might be like to be whole. Other days, he takes it so slowly that can feel her heart beating through her chest. Slowly taking off each piece of clothes, touching her like this is the last time they will ever be together. On those days, she catches him almost smiling. Almost. Those days are hard for her, but she’s with him. She feels better. Never good, but better. At home, even, at home in their own quiet little branch of the haunted mansion.

Some days, when Jill takes a left from work instead of a right towards the Spencer Station, she walks into Leon’s studio apartment and finds him sitting on his bed, his head in his hands. She can glances his eyes between his fingers and laces of dark blonde hair. His eyes are filled to the brim, reliving everything, reexamining every decision he made in the haunted mansion. Revisiting every hallway he so carefully walked, not too slowly, not too fast, not too close to the corner, not too far. Every door he opened - _wondering if this was door he would wish he had never come near-_ every soul he could not save. She read the files of his and Claire’s experiences in Raccoon city. She imagines he is tormented by flashes of red, raven hair and pale skin in a long red dress. Dark lipstick, a predatory feline grace, suave words accompanied by swift, graceful movement. She does not ask him about it. She does not ask him about _her_. He knows about Wesker, about alpha and bravo teams stranded in the Arklay mountains, about the _real_ haunted mansion. She sees him looking at her sometimes, knows that she can see slicked back blonde hair and bright red eyes staring directly at her, knows that she can still feel the brunt of his gun against her, hear that melodic tone of voice which only he possessed. They never ask each other. They simply stay at home with their ghosts and their demons and their quiet, knowing that a monster was laying right outside of their doors, waiting patiently for their return to the haunted mansion.

And so, Jill understood how it was that she had come to love this man.


End file.
